"I don't know if anybody noticed that, for the first time this year, you saw more people getting health care from government than you did from the private sector; not because of anything we did, but because more and more people are losing their health care from their employers. It's becoming unaffordable." --Barack Obama

"[Obama] said, you know, I'm for clean coal, then he says it in speeches, but he doesn't say it in here, and he doesn't say it in the minds of my own people, and he's beginning to be not believable to me." --Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)

"There are kids who are obese in this state who are going to school hungry." --Gov. Bill Ritter of Colorado

"Obamacare flunks the first test of any potential federal law: It is not constitutional." --National Review's Deroy Murdock

"It's not a good idea for Republicans to accept President Barack Obama's invitation to a 'bipartisan' health care summit, because it would not advance acceptable health care reform. The only thing it likely would advance would be Obama's propaganda message -- and, thus, his socialist agenda." --columnist David Limbaugh

"It isn't to evil dictators with a lust for power that Americans have been slowly surrendering their autonomy. It is to well-intentioned authorities who believe sincerely that our freedoms must be circumscribed for our own good. ... First Lady Michelle Obama announced what The New York Times called 'a sweeping initiative ... aimed at revamping the way American children eat and play -- reshaping school lunches, playgrounds, and even medical checkups -- with the goal of eliminating childhood obesity.' Nothing in the Constitution authorizes the federal government to take charge of 'revamping the way American children eat and play.' It is only our passivity that makes such an encroachment possible. This used to be the land of the free. Is it still?" --columnist Jeff Jacoby

"Only two things are infinite -- the expanding universe and Democrats' hostility to the District of Columbia's school choice program. Killing this small program, which currently benefits 1,300 mostly poor and minority children, is odious and indicative. It is a small piece of something large -- the Democrats' dependency agenda, which aims to multiply the ways Americans are dependent on government. ... The dependency agenda is progressive education for children of all ages, meaning all ages treated as children." --columnist George Will

"In the Obama world view, KSM did not perpetrate an act of war but simply pulled off the equivalent of a liquor-store holdup with a somewhat higher body count: it's not a war, it's a law enforcement matter." --columnist Mark Steyn

"[T]he Bush tax cuts are the single largest part of the black hole that is the federal budget deficit." --Newsweak editor Fareed Zakaria

"Let us talk about Dick Cheney and the point that he seems to be trying to make ... is that ... the Obama administration, is not taking terrorism seriously enough. Is this theater or is there a real point to be made?" --CBS's Harry Smith

"'End of an era. The last Kennedy in Congress calling it quits.' ... It was 1946 when [Patrick's] uncle John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected to the House. Then, his uncle, Senator Robert Kennedy, and then his father, Ted. There has always been a Kennedy in Washington." --ABC's Diane Sawyer

"The whole of the anger-at-government movement is predicated on this: Times are tough, the future is confusing, the threat from those who would dismantle our way of life is real, as if we weren't to some extent doing it for them now. And the president's black. But you can't come out and say that's why you're scared. ... And so this is where the euphemisms come in. But taxes haven't gone up, the budget deficit is from the last administration's adventurous war, grandma is much more likely to be death-paneled by your insurance company, and a socialist president would be the one who tried to buy as many voters as possible with stupid tax cuts." --MSNBC's Keith Olbermann

"While the president is showing signs of vulnerability on his handling of the economy -- a majority say he has yet to offer a clear plan for creating jobs -- Americans blame former President George W. Bush, Wall Street and Congress much more than they do Mr. Obama for the nation's economic problems and the budget deficit, the poll found. They credit Mr. Obama more than Republicans with making an effort at bipartisanship, and they back the White House's policies on a variety of disputed issues, from allowing gays to serve openly in the military to repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy." --New York Times' political reporter Adam Nagourney

"At the end of the day, wherever [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] is tried, in whatever forum, what we have to ensure is that it's done as transparently as possible and with adherence to all the rules. If we do that, I'm not sure the location or even the forum is as important as what the world sees in that proceeding." --Attorney General Eric Holder

"We see that the government of Iran -- the supreme leader, the president, the parliament -- is being supplanted and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship. You know, that is our view." --Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sharp as a marble

"To deny what scientists or scientific evidence is showing, is inappropriate. And as I said earlier, to me ... it's unpatriotic." --Bill Nye the Science Guy on global warming and blizzards

"I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think [the debate is over]. This is not my view." --Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the central figure in ClimateGate

"For the longest time, every Republican election has been based on some sentimental bulls--t: the flag, or the flag pin, or the Pledge, or the, 'It's morning in America.' ... Yes, yes, the love of our troops, the ultimate in fake patriotism. Are you kidding? The troops, we pay them like s--t, we f--k them and trick them on deployment, we nickel and dime them on medical care when they get home, not to mention the stupid wars that we send them to. Yeah, we love the troops the way Michael Vick loves dogs." --HBO's Bill Maher

"How much time, do you suppose, has Eric Holder spent as attorney general of the United States explaining that he meant no harm by all the harm he's done?" --columnist Paul Greenberg

"Our government can't even resolve confusion about George Washington's birthday. How could it possibly improve our health care system?" --columnist Tom Purcell

"The bottom line on Obama: He puts our money where his mouth is." --CNS News editor Terence Jeffrey

"The Weather Channel reported snow on the ground in forty-nine states Friday for the first time ever. It's a winter nobody will forget. Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his book on global warming and now it's up for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction." --comedian Argus Hamilton

web posted February 15, 2010

"The Left doesn't want to govern, it wants to rule.... The Left is not about principles. It is about itself. It is about power. Now that President Obama has been politically weakened, look for the mask to come back on. The words of sweet reason, the entreaties to 'make a deal,' and feigned affection will now make a surprise reappearance. When the Left cannot rule, it will try to govern. Until the next time." --columnist Richard Fernandez

"Republicans' objection to national health care could be more accurately portrayed as follows: Obama's plan to nationalize health care was a terrible idea because it would turn over one-sixth of the American economy to Washington bureaucrats, who would run the system as competently as the federal government runs everything else, from airport security to the post office to FEMA." --columnist Ann Coulter

"The fate of ObamaCare is starting to have something of the feel of a Greek tragedy. We are not superstitious, but [Rep. Jack] Murtha's death as the result of medical error at a government-run hospital is certainly an eerie coincidence." --Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto

"Today's tax system was shaped by sadists who were trying to be nice: Every wrinkle in the code was put there to benefit this or that interest. Since the 1986 tax simplification, the code has been recomplicated more than 14,000 times -- more than once a day." --columnist George Will

"Obama's budget points to a dismal future in which half of the country subsists on welfare while the other half receives a paycheck for processing welfare claims in the federal bureaucracy." --columnist Jeffrey Folks

"In the first post-primary Rasmussen survey in Illinois for the Senate seat briefly held by President Obama, the Republican Mark Kirk 'holds a modest 46% to 40% lead over Democrat Alexi Giannoulias.' How embarrassing, how debilitating, would it be if Democrats were to lose Obama's U.S. Senate seat?" --political analyst Rich Galen

"Americans rightly believe that we can build anything that needs building and fix anything that is broken. And, that we can do that by living out our nation's founding principles and values: constitutional government, respect for private property and life, a free market -- and the gumption of hard-working, inventive Americans." --columnist Tony Blankley

"President Obama [is] on the offensive. He has challenged Republicans to a kind of political truth or dare, a meeting February 25 broadcast on TV to discuss health care reform so the country can decide whether Republicans want action or are just the 'Party of No'?" --ABC's Diane Sawyer

"A Palin campaign would certainly be different: Appearing before friendly crowds, using Facebook and Twitter to control the message, not answering tough questions." --NBC's Andrea Mitchell

"Where are they going to go, the Left? Where, actually, are the Left going to go? They may be disaffected." --former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown

"President Barack Obama does have a foreign policy. It's called war. Unfortunately, the president has not defined any real difference between his hawkish approach to international issues and that of his predecessor, former President George W. Bush. Where's the change we can believe in? Bush left a legacy of two wars, neither of which was ever fully explained or justified. Obama has merely picked up the sword that Bush left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan." --White House press reporter Helen Thomas

"This is a democracy. Look, I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, you know, academically approved approach to health care [that] didn't have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it. And just go ahead and have that passed. But that's not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people. Many of whom have their constituents' best interests at heart." --Barack Obama, complaining about representative government -- which isn't a democracy, by the way

"In a letter to President Obama, Senator Ted Kennedy wrote about the need for health care reform. He said what we face is, above all, a moral issue. At stake are not just the principles, the details of the policy, but the fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country. With Senator Kennedy as our inspiration, with the leadership of President Barack Obama and with your help, we will pass health insurance reform this year." --House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

"I think that the most important thing for the public to understand is we're not handling any of these [terrorist] cases any different than the Bush administration handled them all through 9/11." --Barack Obama now trying to use George W. Bush to back himself up

"I am blown away at the celebration of the violence against women in it. That's what comes across to me even more strongly than the anti-abortion message. I myself am a survivor of domestic violence, and I don't find it charming. I think CBS should be ashamed of itself." --NOW president Terry O'Neill on the Super Bowl ad featuring Pam and Tim Tebow

"At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or, as the president called him, 'Corpseman Bouchard.' Twice. Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander in chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there's no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it's revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don't know that he doesn't know that kinda stuff, or they don't know it, either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don't know what they don't know." --columnist Mark Steyn

"As bleak as things are, the silver lining is that [Obama] is the man who campaigned on behalf of R. Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine and, most recently, Martha Coakley. At this point, it's only a rumor, but I've heard that the RNC is negotiating with the president to campaign non-stop for Democratic candidates later this year. ... Based on his record thus far, if Obama was a baseball team, he would be the Chicago Black Sox; if he was a disease, he'd be the bubonic plague; and if he was a ship, he'd be the Titanic." --columnist Burt Prelutsky

"The president dismisses his lack of success by claiming he has not communicated his message enough. Really? I don't care how many news conferences you have, how many speeches you give, or how much money you spend on public relations, if the dog food is bad, the dogs won't eat it." --former Oklahoma Congressman J. C. Watts

"The Weather Channel reported Thursday that last week's ice storms in the South knocked out electricity in some areas for a week. Oklahoma has a firewood shortage because the trees are all frozen. People are staying warm by burning Al Gore's books." --comedian Argus Hamilton

"The Saints won [the Super Bowl] 31-17 over the weekend, and there was a huge snowstorm in Washington with over two feet of snow. So it's true what people say, that the Saints would win when hell freezes over." --comedian Jay Leno?

"I am very optimistic about -- about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration." -- U.S. Vice President Joe Biden

"The small businesses I've talked to -- and I've been talking to a lot of them as I have been traveling around the country -- their biggest problem is right now they can't get credit out of their banks, so they're uncertain about that, and they're still uncertain about orders. You know, do they just have enough customers to justify them doing more? It's looking better at this point, but that's not the rationale for people saying I'm not hiring. Let me put it this way: Most small businesses right now, if they've got enough customers to make a profit and they can get the bank loans required to boost their payroll, boost their inventory and sell to those customers, they will do so." --Barack Obama, the man who has never even had a job in the private sector, much less had to meet payroll

web posted February 8, 2010

"The bigger the government, the less I do for myself, for my family and for my community. That is why we Americans give more charity and devote more time to volunteering than Europeans do. The European knows: The government, the state, will take care of me, my children, my parents, my neighbors and my community. I don't have to do anything. The bigger question in many Europeans' lives is, 'How much vacation time will I have and where will I spend that vacation?' That is what happens when the state gets bigger -- you become smaller." --radio talk-show host Dennis Prager

"Many people ask me whether the Democrats are in as much trouble as they were in 1994. The numbers suggest they are in much deeper trouble, at least at this moment." --political analyst Michael Barone

"When the president directed that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other al Qaeda plotters of Sept. 11 be tried in a civilian court in Manhattan, [our] enemies knew they had the president's number for once and all. Now, with even stalwarts in his own party denouncing a civilian trial in Manhattan as the nut-ball idea of the year, he's looking for a smart solution, a way to look tough in retreat. He should take the trial to San Francisco, where the flame that warms the cult burns brightest, and where surely no one would object." --Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden

"[E]verything the president proposes means more debt, which at the level this guy's spending means, at some point down the road, either higher taxes or total societal collapse." --columnist Mark Steyn

"Americans are not victims who need handouts. Americans need the freedom to flourish. And until our president realizes this, he, and America, will lose out." --National Review editor Kathryn Lopez

"We must present a clear choice: stay the course of progressive liberalism, which moves away from popular consent, the rule of law, and constitutional government, and toward a failed, undemocratic, and illiberal form of statism; or correct course in an effort to restore the conditions of liberty and renew the bedrock principles and constitutional wisdom that are the roots of America's continuing greatness." --Heritage Foundation scholar Matthew Spalding

"America's future is clear: Unless we start cutting spending and take control of entitlement programs, our children will go broke making good on our promises. ... The government can never spend its way out of recession. It can only get out of the way, through lower tax rates and less costly regulation, and allow private business to grow again." --columnist Rich Tucker

"If health care doesn't pass, because this budget assumes health care will pass, that's yet another $150 billion that would be tacked on to the deficit." --NBC's Chuck Todd regurgitating the fiction that paying out more government dollars on "health care" is going to save money

"Republicans should know that their partisanship means they are rejecting medical security that is available in most countries of the world for its citizens. Shame on them!" --White House press corpse reporter Helen Thomas

"Tea-party people are libertarians, and on the state level, they are organizing around the notion of using the 10th Amendment (which affirms state's rights) to overturn health-care legislation -- should it still pass by some miracle. It's hard to take their rhetoric seriously. Where else could they go in the world to be freer? It reminds me of the slogan shouted at antiwar protesters, 'America, love it or leave it.'" --Newsweek's Eleanor Clift

"[Obama] needs one or two [Republican] votes in the Senate to get anything passed. That's the political reality. But he needs to, perhaps, bully Republicans into doing that, rather than doing this careful walk around them." --Newsweek's Katie Connolly

"We're not going to save our way out of this recession. We've got to spend our way out of this recession, and I think most economists know that." --Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC)

"Let me say this about ... the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we've presented -- and there's some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your -- if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you're not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge." --Barack Obama at the GOP retreat in Baltimore

"The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries." --Barack Obama

"I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that 'we have to do better.'" --Education Secretary Arne Duncan

"Well, let me tell you what Plan A is for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going to meet justice and he's going to meet his maker. ... He will be brought to justice, and he's likely to be executed for the heinous crimes that he committed in killing -- in masterminding the killing of -- 3,000 Americans. ... The Attorney General believes that the best place to do this is in an American courtroom." --White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on the show trial for KSM

"The budget presented by our president today could only have been written by Rosie Scenario." --University of Maryland professor Peter Morici

"Toyota apologized Saturday for faulty gas pedals on four million vehicles just recalled. When you press the pedal down it stays down and the car accelerates out of control. Whoever designed the gas pedal should be fired and made Treasury Secretary." --comedian Argus Hamilton

"While fighting to stay awake during his State of the Union speech, it occurred to me that for over a year now, Obama has been speaking and behaving like the leader of an occupying force. Which, the more I thought about it, is exactly who I think he is." --columnist Burt Prelutsky

"Washington, Obama tells us, is 'unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems.' So let's have more Washington! In our schools, in our hospitals, in our cars, in everything! Which raises the question: Does even Obama listen to Obama's speeches?" --columnist Mark Steyn

"Even Obama's speech reminded me of 'The Wizard of Oz' -- he built a straw man, had a tin ear and spent the whole talk cowardly lyin'." --comedian Evan Sayet

web posted February 1, 2010

"The problem is not the 'crises' Obama inherited. It's the ones he's creating. He has lived in such a socialist policy shell all his life that he doesn't have a clue that he's on a different planet than most of us. If he were just slightly less narcissistic, he might be able to figure this out. But ... no matter what adjustments he promises to make following the Boston Massacre, he still intends to govern like a socialist. He only wants to do a better job of figuring out how to do it less visibly, hoping we won't 'get it' before it's too late." --columnist David Limbaugh

"An across-the-board tax cut is the fairest pro-growth message of them all. Lower tax rates for everybody. Get out of the box of rich people and class warfare. ... Republicans must now be bold and fight for across-the-board tax relief, for families, individuals and businesses, along with smaller government, fewer services and across-the-board spending cuts." --economist Larry Kudlow

"The President could wait months before deciding to give a general the troops he asked for to fight the war in Afghanistan but there was never to be enough time for the health care bill to be exposed in the light of day to the usual Congressional hearings and debate. Moreover, despite all the haste, the health care program would not actually go into effect until after the 2012 presidential election. In other words, the public was not supposed to find out whether the government's takeover of medical care actually made things better or worse until after it was too late." --economist Thomas Sowell

"The result in Massachusetts last Tuesday showed that for yet another segment of the population which has had the opportunity to express itself at the ballot box, Obama's policies have diminished from a lack of resonance to active dissonance. Obama can tinker with the political shop all he wants, but to misquote my neighbor James Carville: It's the policies, stupid." --political analyst Rich Galen

"As even Massachusetts demonstrated ... most Americans believe Americans know how to solve their problems through initiative, limited government and hard work, not through the nanny state." --American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

"There is a simple way to get corporate money out of politics: get the government out of our lives and economic affairs. If government has no favors to sell, no one will spend money trying to win them." --columnist John Stossel

"Last spring, the polls said people wanted health care reform. They even wanted the public option. ... One third of that majority is on a government health program. I'm on Medicare. People who've been in the military are on a government health program. And yet the Republicans were able the make the idea that being on a government health program is terrible. How absurd." --retired ABC newsman Sam Donaldson

"Instead of loudly fighting back, the president tried to bring Republicans into the fold, and it backfired.... On health care reform, instead of telling Americans exactly what he wanted in a health care bill, President Obama left it up to lawmakers. Republicans used the president's strategy to create fear and confusion among voters." --CNN's Carol Costello

"Absolutely amazing poll results from CNN today about the $787 stimulus package: nearly three out of four Americans think the money has been wasted. On second thought, they may be right: it's been wasted on them. ... This is yet further evidence that Americans are flagrantly ill-informed ... and, for those watching Fox News, misinformed." --Time mag's Joe Klein

"This is a Supreme Court-sanctioned murder of what little actual democracy is left in this democracy. It is government of the people by the corporations for the corporations. It is the Dark Ages. It is our Dred Scott. ... Be prepared, then, for the ban on same-sex marriage, on abortion, on evolution, on separation of church and state ... for racial and religious profiling, because you've got to blame somebody for all the reductions in domestic spending and civil liberties, just to make sure the agitators against the United Corporate States of America are kept unheard." --MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, hosting his show funded by a giant media corporation, yet reviling the Supreme Court's ruling that corporations have a free speech right to participate in elections

"I'd probably say I make a mistake a day, maybe two." --Barack Obama

"[T]he Recovery Act the president passed has created more than -- or saved more than 2 million jobs." --White House adviser David Axelrod

"Just last quarter, we finally saw the first positive economic job growth in more than a year, largely as a result of the recovery plan that's put money back into our economy, that saved or created 1.5 million jobs." --White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs

"I think the American people want health care reform.... [They] really do want us to do something about this." --former DNC Chief Howard Dean

"Democrats would not be playing the blame game with one another for the loss or for the health care debacle if they had only pointed fingers at those (or in this case, the one) who put Americans (and most of the world) in the predicament we're in: George W. Bush." -- James Carville

"Some conservative Beltway analysts are cheering Obama's fiscal freeze follies as a step in the right direction, a rhetorical victory and a 'good start.' Pardon me for not joining in the standing ovation for the latest performance of White House kabuki theater. Praising the president for carrying on the charade of budget reform because a few piddling cuts are real is like complimenting the Naked Emperor's fingernails: So he didn't have any clothes. At least his cuticles were real. It's a start!" --columnist Michelle Malkin

"At best, the administration's spending-freeze proposal is akin to going on a monthlong binge in Vegas and then sleeping off the hangover." --Cato Institute senior fellow Dan Mitchell

"Once again, the people have spoken, and this time they quoted what Dick Cheney said to Pat Leahy. Less than two weeks ago, The New York Times said that so much as a 'tighter-than-expected' victory for Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley would incite 'soul-searching among Democrats nationally,' which sent Times readers scurrying to their dictionaries to look up this strange new word, 'soul.'" --columnist Ann Coulter

"ABC News found that Trijicon, which makes rifle scopes for the military, stamps references to Bible verses on its equipment. The defense contractor subsequently announced that it will voluntarily stop stamping these references on combat rifle sights. These sights are used in Iraq and Afghanistan -- sometimes to train Muslims, sometimes to shoot them. According to ABC News, this is very important. If a Muslim were to see this code on the side of a rifle and then look up the verse in one of the many Bibles you can easily find in Muslim countries, then that Muslim might become indoctrinated with Christianity and then ... chaos or something. Or maybe we just worry that the mere knowledge of a reference to the Bible in those countries will cause all Muslims in the Middle East to panic and randomly shoot each other in the faces...." --columnist Frank J. Fleming

"In [the president's] budget, which we passed 100 days after his swearing-in, he had a blueprint for how we go into the future, create jobs, stabilize the economy [and] do so as we reduce the deficit -- [it's] very central to everything we do -- reduce the deficit." --House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who contributed to nearly quadrupling the deficit in Obama's first year

"You know, I was trying to think about who [Barack Obama] was tonight, and it's interesting: He is post-racial by all appearances. You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour." --MSNBC host Chris Matthews, with a slobbering sycophantic (and genuinely racist) analysis of the State of the Union address

"We also had some good news for the first time in approximately two years. The projection of revenues has stabilized, not decreased. That is a very good sign because it is a sign that people are in fact making money and will be in a position, because they're making money, to pay a portion of that in revenues to the federal government." --House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD)